Aside from whipping up hate against the 3 million EU citizens in the EU with her outrageous insinuation that EU workers have cheated their way into the UK, Theresa May is also using Brexit as an excuse to vandalise the NHS.
10% of NHS doctors have come to the UK from the EU via Freedom of Movement. 7% of EU nurses, and 7% of all UK care workers.
The NHS is already straining under a Tory-created recruitment crisis (8 years of NHS funding cuts, scrapping of NHS Bursaries, the sickening Tory treatment of junior doctors, massive cuts to social care services causing a huge increase in demand for NHS services, the collapse in overseas nurse recruitment since the Brexit vote).
The NHS is short of 41,000 nurses and 12,000 doctors already, and the recruitment gap is getting bigger and bigger with staff shortages of 350,000 predicted within a decade.
So by deliberately slamming the door shut on skilled health care workers from the EU, and by making EU-born health workers who are already here feel unwelcome by deliberately whipping up public hate against them with insinuations they cheated their way into the country, Theresa May is clearly intent on exacerbating the NHS recruitment crisis.
Why would Theresa May and the Tories wish to deliberately push the NHS towards ruin in this way?
The reason is that the Tories have always hated the NHS with an undying ideological passion, ever since they opposed its creation back in the 1940s.
They hate it because providing health care on the basis of need, rather than the ability to pay for it, is an example of socialism in action.
When poor and ordinary people with serious illnesses are prioritised over extremely wealthy people with minor ailments, it makes the Tories and their mega-rich backers furious, because selfish entitled elitists like them believe that the rich should always have the ability to buy their way to the front of any queue.
Theresa May's efforts to drive skilled EU workers out of the NHS are all part of the grand Tory scheme to privatise the NHS and replace the universal health care model with private insurance system, whereby the wealthy get the best treatment while the poor and uninsured are left to the mercies of massively over-crowded and under-funded charity hospitals.
The Tories are seeking to undermine, underfund, and de-staff the NHS as much as possible because they know that the only way they can sell their NHS privatisation agenda to the public is by reducing the quality of service to such an extent that people will accept their NHS privatisation propaganda out of sheer desperation.
Don't just take my word for it, consider what the Chair of Conservative Health Paul Charlson's view that the only possible way to replace the NHS with a private fee-based system would be "if there was a feeling in the country that health services are falling apart".
And what better way to ensure that health services are falling apart than by following up 8 years of ruinous ideologically driven funding cuts (at a time of rising demand for services) with a deliberately manufactured NHS recruitment crisis?
If Theresa May succeeds in using Brexit as a means of wrecking the NHS and bringing in a privatised health insurance based replacement the Tories will be absolutely ecstatic because they've been desperate to get rid of the socialist NHS for over 70 years.
If she succeeds she'd go from being the hubristic fool who threw away her own majority, to the revered Tory leader who finally achieved the Tory wet dream of destroying the NHS.
Ironically the people who would suffer the most from this Tory ruination of the NHS are the demographics who were most likely to have voted for Brexit in the first place: the pensioners, and people from poor left-behind communities. Because pensioners and the poor are also by far the most likely to be dependent on the provision of free healthcare, and the ones least likely to be able to cover the cost of private health insurance premiums.
And worst of all, not an insignificant number of these Brexit voters will have voted for Brexit because they believed the '£350 million for the NHS' lie on that damned Brexit bus, and imagined that voting for Brexit would actually help the NHS!
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It doesn't matter how many positive platitudes about health workers and the universal health care system they spout, right-wing politicians actually hate the NHS with a burning ideological passion, because they hate socialism, and the NHS is one of the world's finest examples of socialism in action.
Any right-wing politician in the UK with even a few brain cells to rub together knows that the NHS principle of health care that is free at the point of need is still overwhelmingly popular with the British public.
This means that they have to lie about their ideological fantasy of carving the NHS into pieces to give away to their corporate mates, and scrapping the socialist principle of universal health care.
They know they have to lie because the vast majority of British people would reject them if they dared to tell the truth about what they'd like to do with the NHS.
In fact, the NHS is so popular it's even supported by the majority of Tory voters (how Tory voters who love the NHS reconcile this with their choice to vote for an anti-socialist party that vandalises the NHS every time they get into power is one of the crucial political questions of British politics).
This pragmatic need to cover up their hatred of the NHS means that it's rare that right-wing politicians tell the truth about the NHS, but occasionally they do.
One right-wing politician who let his true feelings about the NHS seep out is the Tory MP Jeremy Hunt who co-authored a book calling for the NHS to be scrapped and replaced with a private insurance based system.
It just goes to show how much contempt David Cameron had for the NHS that he put Jeremy Hunt in charge of it, and it goes to show that Theresa May is equally contemptuous toward the NHS that she decided to keep him on as health secretary when she had the chance to get rid of him.
That's two Tory Prime Ministers in a row who saw a man who wanted to scrap the NHS as the ideal person to run the NHS!
Another Tory right-winger who outlined his contempt for the idea of universal health care is the Tory propagandist Henry Hill, who went as far as publishing his blueprint for wrecking the NHS in a blog post.
The former UKIP leader Paul Nuttall is another right-winger who has spoken openly about his NHS views. Before he became UKIP leader Nuttall wrote blog posts and made speeches expressing his hatred for the NHS and its staff, celebrating the ideological vandalism the Tories have been doing to the NHS since 2012, and making up outright lies about NHS staffing levels and the efficiency of NHS services.
Yet another right-wing politician who accidentally let the truth out about the Tory policy towards the NHS is the chairman of Conservative Health Paul Charlson who claimed that charging for NHS services is "a good idea in principle… [BUT] It would be political suicide for a party to introduce this. They could only really do it if there was a feeling in the country that health services
were falling apart".
The Tory strategy is that the NHS has to be under-funded and mismanaged to the point of destruction in order that they can try to get away with scrapping the free at the point of need principle and bringing in charging for services, which would allow the wealthy to queue jump.
Whatever Tory and UKIP politicians say about how much they love and respect the NHS, it's vital to remember that they're just lying through their teeth because they know that's what the vast majority of the British public want to hear.
In reality right-wingers hate the NHS with a burning ideological passion and can't wait for the day that they get to scrap the unmistakably socialist principle of prioritising health care by need rather than the ability to pay.
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Just imagine the howls of outrage in the mainstream media if the British Medical Journal had published a study that showed that the policies of a Labour government had led to 120,000 deaths, which were described as "economic murder" by one of the study co-authors.
The British Medical Journal have published such a report, but the conclusion is that the excess 120,000 deaths are the result of massive ideologically driven Tory cuts to the NHS and social care system.
Co-author Professor Lawrence King of the Applied Health Research Unit at Cambridge University said that "it is now very clear that austerity does not promote growth or reduce deficits – it is bad economics, but good class politics". He added that the results of the study show that the Tories have overseen "a public health disaster" and claimed that "it is not an exaggeration to call it economic murder".
The report also suggests that without a significant increase in health spending there could be an additional 150,000 excess deaths between 2015 and 2020.
150,000 excess deaths is an awful lot of to imagine, so to put it into perspective, this report suggests that Tory austerity dogma comes with a death toll the equivalent of a September 11th 2001 scale terrorist attack every single month for five punishing years.
I'm sure Tory tribalists will find plenty of excuses for this staggering mass of excess deaths that have been linked to their fixation with hard-right economic policies.
They'll weave their sick little justification narratives about how the economy is better off without the people who have died because most of the dead were economically inactive elderly and disabled people. Or they'll try to cast doubt on the findings of the study with displays of anti-intellectual sneering towards the experts who worked on it. Or they run disinformation campaigns by bombarding people with misleading statistics designed to distract people from the ideologically driven cuts to health and social care funding their party has been enacting.
But the real issue isn't the sick excuses and distraction tactics spewed by the minority of Tories who find themselves cornered on the subject of the death toll that comes with Tory austerity dogma. The big issue is that swathes of the mainstream media are refusing to publicise the fact that Tory austerity dogma comes with this huge death toll.
The left-leaning Independent and Daily Mirror have covered the story as well as the much maligned Russian state broadcaster RT and (somewhat surprisingly) the right-wing Daily Mail & Metro, but somehow the BBC have completely overlooked it, preferring to fixate on the growing number of sexual indecency allegations against Kevin Spacey as their headline news (as if the actions of one indecent actor somehow outweigh the avoidable loss of 120,000 lives due to Tory austerity dogma).
It's easy to understand why right-wing pro-austerity news outlets like The S*n, Express, Times, and Telegraph might want to ignore an academic report that details the body count of their beloved austerity dogma, but it's quite something else that the supposedly impartial UK state broadcaster has decided to ignore a study that suggests the UK state is responsible for over a hundred thousand excess deaths, and will be responsible for a further 500+ more every week from now until 2020.
So next time you hear anyone droning on about how RT is just Russian propaganda, you don't need to disagree with them, but you really should explain that the BBC runs propaganda for the UK state, and remind them of how the BBC didn't even bother to report the fact that Tory austerity has such an obscene death toll when RT actually did.
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Jeremy Hunt's pathetic effort to steal credit for probably the greatest achievement of the Labour Party is bad enough as it is, because it's a sickening display of historical revisionism to claim credit for the creation of the NHS when your party fought tooth and nail to prevent it, voting against it 22 times.
What makes it even worse though is that Jeremy Hunt is actually overseeing the deliberate rundown of the NHS under the tried and tested Tory strategy of systematically crippling public services with funding cuts and destructive reforms in order to sell privatisation as their snake oil cure to the problems that they themselves caused.
Jeremy Hunt has been overseeing the biggest NHS funding cuts in decades and the mass privatisation of NHS services into the hands of private profiteers like Circle Health (operated by a bunch of major Tory party donors) and Richard Branson's Virgin Health.
Under anything like normal circumstances anyone with a shred of decency should be outraged that the man who is actually overseeing the ideological ruination of the NHS is falsely claiming credit for its creation. But the Tories have got so adept at spewing reality-reversing propaganda that Hunt's outrageous revisionism is unexceptional against the constant barrage of distortions, misrepresentations, malicious fantasies, economically illiterate propaganda, divide & conquer tactics, and outright lies from his Tory colleagues.
After trying to claim credit for the creation of the organisation he is enthusiastically dismantling, Hunt went on to push another extraordinary propaganda tactic.
Instead of addressing the urgent problem that Tory policies (scrapping NHS bursaries & their outright contempt for the rights of EU citizens working in the UK) have resulted in a huge 23% drop in the number of trainee nurses, he actually announced an extra 5,000 nurse training places!
Anyone with a grip on the facts would ask "what the hell is the point in creating an extra 5,000 nurse training places when your policies have actually collapsed the number of trainee nurses by 10,000?"
But then the art of Tory politics is to deny the public the basic facts, and hope that they fall for the propaganda.
Of course citizens have some responsibility to learn the absolutely fundamental facts for themselves (Labour created the NHS, the Tories have created a huge NHS recruitment crisis by scrapping NHS bursaries and lumbering trainee nurses with vast debts) but the real responsibility lies with mainstream media hacks.
There's no way that pro-Tory hacks are unaware of the Tory-instigated NHS recruitment crisis or the fact that there isn't a hope in hell that Jeremy Hunt's 5,000 extra nurse training places will be filled, but they'll uncritically repeat the Tory propaganda line about the "biggest increase in nurse training places in NHS history" without explaining the context, because complicity and deception in favour of the ruling establishment is their job.
The billionaires who own the media platforms these hacks work for have vested interests in the privatisation of the NHS (which represents rich pickings for corporate profiteers), so mainstream media hacks will push Jeremy Hunt's lies and spin as hard as they can in the desperate hope that people like you and I are so under-informed that we'd actually believe that the Tories founded the NHS (rather than fighting it every step of the way), and that creating 5,000 extra nursing places after you've just chased 10,000 trainee nurses per year away with the prospect of astronomical debts is a sensible approach to NHS recruitment.
Hopefully this Tory pitch to the catastrophically under-informed backfires in their faces as decent people recoil in revulsion at the Orwellian revisionism and the sheer bloody-minded refusal to engage with the reality of the recruitment crisis their own reforms have created.
But then 13.67 million people voted Tory in Theresa May's vanity election, so they're either the catastrophically under-informed Tory target audience, or they're actually happy with the ongoing Tory vandalism of the NHS (maybe they've got private health insurance and don't give a shit about anyone else? Maybe they own investments in private health companies looking to gorge themselves on the Tory NHS carve-up? Or maybe they're naive enough to believe that they have some magical lifelong immunity from serious illness?).
Still, figuring out why so many people would vote for a party that is actively wrecking the NHS in front of their eyes is a bit of a toughie. If you know anyone who voted Tory in Theresa May's vanity election, perhaps you could ask them to explain why they actively endorsed Jeremy Hunt's continued vandalism of the NHS?
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
One of the most insidious things about extreme-rightg Brexit propagandists is the way that they deliberately foster victim-complex thinking.
The latest example is an article on the Arron Banks bankrolled propaganda page Westmonster crying that the nasty EU is punishing the UK for leaving by not immediately agreeing to let Brits keep one of the primary benefits of EU membership after we leave.
Westmonster/Leave.EU
The EU referendum allowed the extreme-right fanatic Arron Banks a perfect opportunity to massively increase his influence over British politics by setting up a rival pro-Brexit campaign called Leave.EU (the one that used Nazi style imagery to fearmonger about refugees).
Instead of packing the campaign up after the referendum (like the official Vote Leave and the pro-Remain Stronger In Europe), Banks has opportunistically turned the Leave.EU into his own personal propaganda outfit.
Attracting over a million social media followers (867,000+ on Facebook, 133,000+ on Twitter) by waving a Brexit flag at them and then using this huge social media audience to promote the most fanatically right-wing interpretation of Brexit, bigoted xenophobia, pro-Trump propaganda, and endless links to his own Westmonster website (which is absolutely blathered in adverts for Banks' own Go Skippy car insurance company).
The EHIC card
The latest Westmonster/Leave.EU propaganda attack on the European Union entitled "Spiteful EU threatens to scrap free healthcare for Brits abroad" relates to the European Health Insurance Card (EHIC) which currently allows EU citizens to travel in Europe and claim back the cost of any medical treatment from their home countries.
The Tories are arguing that British travellers in Europe should still have access to the EHIC scheme even after we quit the EU, but the EU negotiators have said that they need to study the issue further before making a decision.
Despite Theresa May and the Tories using the lives of EU citizens in the UK as disposable gambling chips in the negotiations, the extreme-right Westmonster/Leave.EU mob are spitting bile that the EU aren't immediately caving in and handing the UK one of the biggest advantages of EU membership!
Project fear
The possibility of the UK losing access to one of the really big benefits of EU membership as a consequence of quitting the EU was always pretty damned obvious, but you'll remember how the Brexiteers shrieked "project fear" at anyone who dared suggest that Brexit might be a highly complex process fraught with pitfalls and dangers for Brits and the British economy.
The likes of Arron Banks and the Leave.EU mob operated on the model of pushing blatant fearmongering and lies (like the Nazi style anti-refugee posters and the "eek Turkey is joining the EU" lies) and then howling "project fear" at anyone who raised legitimate doubts about the fact that the Brexiteers were clearly just making things up as they went along, with no actual plan for what to do if they actually managed to win the referendum with such despicable tactics.
Now they're having an absolute hissy fit because one of the potential consequences they dismissed as "project fear" during the referendum debate is still a possibility.
Brazen Tory propaganda
One thing that jumps straight out of the article is the claim that the UK made a "fair and serious offer" on EU citizens rights.
Anyone who did the slightest research knows that the UK ofer was an absolute insult that has been severely criticised by EU citizens in the UK, UK citizens in the EU, and which came 11 days after the submission of a much better and more comprehensive citizens' rights offer from the EU that went completely ignored by the Tories.
The fact that Westmonster chose to uncritically recycle the "fair and serious offer" Tory propaganda word for word just goes to show what their real agenda is.
They have no intention whatever to hold the Tory government to account for the inept way they're handling Brexit because their primary objective is to spread hatred of the EU, not to get a good deal for British citizens.
Bullying
The word-for-word repetition of Tory propaganda appears in the most sickening paragraph of all:
"It's especially bad considering Theresa May has already made a 'fair and serious offer' to EU citizens living in Britain, allowing them to apply for settled status. But that was on the condition that British citizens living abroad would maintain their rights. So has the EU just kiboshed its own citizens getting a good deal too?"
There is no other way to read this than as a threat against EU citizens' living in the UK if the EU doesn't cave in and give Brits one of the main membership benefits of their "spiteful, vengeful dictatorship"!
If the EU don't let us keep our access to EHIC even after we've left, then the absolute insult of an offer on EU citizens' rights is going in the bin, presumably to be replaced with a very much worse collective punishment policy against EU citizens in the UK.
The Westmonster article basically says "give us what we want or we'll deliberately punish EU citizens living in the UK" and has the absolute gall to accuse the EU of being the spiteful bullies at the same time!
Endangering the negotiations
Framing the EHIC debate as a plucky honest UK taking on a "spiteful EU" is exactly the kind of extreme and divisive rhetoric that endangers the negotiations.
Just think about it for yourself for a moment: Which proposition would you be most likely to accept?
Arron Banks' extreme-right propaganda machine is poisoning the political debate over the EHIC card with divisive rhetoric accusing the EU negotiators of being "spiteful" people "sticking two fingers up at Britain" and the describing the EU as a "spiteful, vengeful dictatorship" all based on the fact that the EU aren't immediately caving in to Tory demands that Brits get to keep one of the primary benefits of membership of the ... err ... "spiteful, vengeful dictatorship"!
Could we continue with the existing arrangement we already have in this area because it has obvious benefits to both of us?
Give me what I want immediately you fucking spiteful bully or I'll collectively punish people you care about.
Even infant school children know that you're more likely to get what you want by being nice than by lobbing a load of insults and threats around.
Anyone who thinks that toxifying the Brexit negotiations with this kind of divisive extreme-right rhetoric is anything but an impediment to Britain getting a good deal has to be suffering extreme diplomatic illiteracy.
And only the most terrifyingly delusional of halfwits could possibly imagine that Brits will somehow retain access to the benefit of EHIC if the divisive rhetoric from the Arron Banks' propaganda mob succeeds in triggering a nuclear "no deal" Tory strop out of the EU.
Victim-complexing
The idea that the EU are horrible bullies because they won't immediately cave in and hand the UK one of the prime benefits of EU membership is a classic example of the extreme-right victim-complexing propaganda tactic.
It doesn't really matter what the story is, the extreme-right will always find a way of framing it as a piteous victim narrative in order to dupe people into wallowing in self pity instead of actually engaging their critical thinking skills.
This tactic works a treat because once the extreme-right have inflated people's victim complexes to the size of hot air balloons, it only takes the slightest puff of hot air to get them all floating in the political direction they want them to, and the direction the Arron Banks/Westmonster/Leave.EU mob are blowing towards a socially and economically ruinous nuclear "no deal" Tory strop out of Europe.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
The terrorist attacks in Manchester and London are still heavily dominating the political debate.
The Tories and their cheerleaders in the mainstream media flinging ever more desperate and disgusting smears at Jeremy Corbyn in order to make out that he sides with them and outrageously passing the buck for their own failings onto the Muslim community (who repeatedly reported the attackers to the authorities for extremism but were ignored).
The Labour Party are pointing to their costed manifesto commitments to reverse the savage Tory cuts to our police, emergency services and UK Border Agency, criticising the Tory public safety cuts and questioning how the hell these attacks by known jihadists were allowed to happen.
So an awful lot of the talk is about terrorism and security, but please don't forget our NHS heroes.
Please don't let the terrorists win by letting horror at their actions totally over-rule the fundamentally important political issue of NHS funding.
Our doctors, paramedics, nurses, and surgeons were absolute heroes after the terrorist attacks, and NHS staff like mental health specialists and physiotherapists will be heroes of the recovery.
The evidence is absolutely clear that the NHS cannot afford another five years of Tory vandalism.
Don't just believe me, ask anyone you know who works in the NHS about whether services have got better or worse over the last seven years.
Many argue the chaos in the NHS is deliberately being provoked in order to push more privatisation.
This may sound like a cynical conspiracy theory but the Chairman of Conservative Health Paul Charlson even explained the purpose of this ruinous Tory NHS agenda is to scrap the free at the point of use principle, and replace it with a US style private health insurance model.
The socialist principle that health care is delivered on the basis of need, not on the ability to pay for it is the single most fundamental pillar of the NHS.
Paul Charlson openly admitted that scrapping such a policy would be "political suicide" and that the only way the Tories could get away with it is if the NHS were reduced to such a state of crisis that "we need to start paying for health treatment now" can be introduced as the Tory justification narrative for their NHS-wrecking agenda.
If we hand Theresa May and her Tory wreckers the keys to the NHS for another five years then maybe the terrorist attacks of the future will come with huge US-style medical bills for the victims, and for the families of the victims who died on the treatment table?
NHS staff are heroes who go above and beyond the call of duty to care for us. Our NHS heroes deserve better than another five years of Tory NHS-mismanagement.
The great British public have paid for the NHS through our taxes. We deserve better than another five years of Tory NHS-mismanagement.
Respect our wonderful NHS staff, and respect yourself.
Vote against the Tories to save the NHS.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
Do you remember when the mainstream media whipped up a storm of condemnation of Theresa May and the Tories after a study at Herriot Watt university found that the Tory Work Capacity Assessment regime is "fundamentally discriminatory to people with mental health conditions", that staff carrying out the assessments were unqualified to make mental health judgements, and that the discriminatory WCA process actually intensified the mental health conditions of many of the people who were forced to go through it?
No. Because it didn't happen.
Just like the UK press failed to whip up a storm of condemnation of the Tory government when the courts ruled that their Work Capacity Assessment was discriminatory towards people with mental health conditions in 2013, yet they carried on regardless.
Just like the UK press failed to whip up a storm of condemnation of the Tory government when it was revealed in January 2016 that this discriminatory Tory Work Capacity Assessment regime actually costs far more in corporate outsourcing fees than it will ever save in reduced benefits payments, meaning the whole traumatic farce actually relies of taxpayer subsidies to keep going.
Just like the UK press failed to whip up a storm of condemnation of the Tory government when the United Nations produced a scathing report into the way disabled people's rights are being systematically violated by the Tory government.
Just like UK press failed to whip up a storm of condemnation of the Tory government when they were caught specifically instructing the corporations who administer the Work Capacity Assessment regime to actively discriminate against people with mental health conditions (whilst simultaneously dressing themselves up as champions of mental health!).
Why the media blackout?
The suffering of people with mental health conditions under this discriminatory Tory assessment regime just isn't considered newsworthy by the majority of the mainstream press.
It's not newsworthy for two main reasons.
The first is that, even though there are millions of disabled people in the UK, the suffering of disabled people just doesn't sell enough newspapers or generate enough website clicks. A significant swathe of the mainstream media won't touch stories like the ongoing systematic abuse of disabled people, because they'd make more money by churnalising sensationalist guff.
The other main reason the systematic Tory abuse of disabled people given so little prominence is that it runs counter to the pro-Tory bias of the mainstream press. They're not going to expend time on holding the Tory government to account for their callous mistreatment of disabled people when their billionaire bosses are fanatically pro-Tory. It's a matter of self-interest for most mainstream media hacks. Push the agenda that their sociopathic right-wing billionaire bosses demand, or get pushed out of the door at the next round of redundancies. Stay on message or face the chop.
What we can do
- Support independent media because independent journalists have the freedom to write what they want to write about, and don't have to worry about getting sacked if they stray from the propaganda lines imposed by the fanatically right-wing billionaires who own the publications they work for.
- Share this article to let more people know about the way the mainstream media consistently under-reports the savage Tory mistreatment of disabled people.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
Jeremy Corbyn's grassroots football policy is simple but brilliant. He wants to boost grassroots football by ensuring that a small portion of the £billions in TV revenues flowing to the top clubs is used to support grassroots football.
This policy isn't just brilliant for English football because it will give many thousands more kids the facilities and opportunities to strive to become the elite players of the future, it'll also be a massive boost for the health of the nation.
Players
Anyone who follows football will be aware of the way Jamie Vardy climbed from the non-league to become a legend in Leicester City's astonishing Premier League winning campaign. Until 2010 he was playing for Stocksbridge Park Steelers FC. Then after stints with non-league Halifax Town and Fleetwood Town he joined Leicester City, going on to beat the Premier League record by scoring in eleven consecutive games and score his first goal for England in a 3-2 win against Germany.
How many more Jamie Vardy's might thrive and climb their way towards the pinnacle of the English game with better funding and facilities at the grass roots level?
Coaches
The benefit wouldn't just be for players either. Better facilities and more opportunities mean that English football coaching can begin to crawl out of the international basement. In 2014 England had just 1,395 UEFA A qualified coaches. In comparison Germany had 6,934 and Spain a whopping 15,423.
Given the lack of qualified coaches it any wonder that it's now an incredible 25 years since the last English manager led a team to the English league title? (Howard Wilkinson, Leeds United, 1991-92)
More money for the grassroots game will mean more aspiring coaches learning the skills to to bring the best out in British kids, and to succeed at the top level where previous generations have failed.
Public health
The public health benefits of more people playing sport are so obvious as to barely need explaining: Regular exercise is one of the most fundamental aspects of a healthy lifestyle, and the bonding experience of being part of a team is obviously a massive mental health benefit too.
The healthier lives people lead, the less reliant on the health service they are. Public health isn't just good for the individuals, it's good for the taxpayer too.
Conclusion
Corbyn's policy of ensuring 5% of the TV revenues are used to support grassroots football isn't some kind of punishment for the elite clubs. They can easily afford it, and the long-term benefits of more kids with decent football facilities, and more adults actively engaged in the game will more than compensate the big clubs in the long-run when the next superstar players, managers and coaches begin to flow up to the top of the game.
Jeremy Corbyn's belief that "football is for the many" is something that must surely resonate with anyone who has ever played at the grassroots level.
It's a fantastically simple policy that will be of enormous benefit to the long-term future of the British game.
And even if you don't much like football, getting more people involved in sport would clearly be a fantastic public health benefit too.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
